Swiss Chard and Green Tomatoes

At the end of August, before our vacation, Michael planted Rainbow Swiss Chard. Chard is popular in Mediterranean cooking and reputed to have high nutritional value. Still, it's a thick-leafed business, so I either need to cook it or.....my favorite: make it into pesto. Eh voila!


Rainbow Swiss Chard, preparing for a bath...
actually, this, ladies and gentleman, is bath 1 of 3.



....and into the collander for a nice drip-dry.

So, how do I make swiss chard pesto? I'm glad you asked. First, be sure to have a schnauzer nearby to get behind legs and between feet. This makes the process particularly exciting, notably when you're moving between cutting board and food processor. Be prepared to reprimand the young lad frequently and point to the kitchen door repeatedly, to little avail. Next, fill your food processor with olive oil (one glug), a fist full of almonds (right now they're the most reasonably priced nut available at Costco, two shakes of parmesean (from the pour-out side not the shake side), two cloves of garlic (peeled, crushed, and finely chopped), a squirt of lemon juice (for good luck...no, actually to keep the greenery from browning so dramatically), and  a teaspoon of salt. When all that is in the processor, add chopped swiss chard (chopped so that it actually processes, rather than only partially processing and leaving large shredded leaf pieces along the processing bowl sides...such sights cause Savannah to make a frowny face).  After you've done all that (I had so much chard, I did the above method three times), you have pesto to freeze the willies out of, like this:

And in it's final form: pesto!  It's in the freezer for a long winter's
nap. Well, I'll probably wake some of it up in a week or so.

Now, let's talk green tomatoes. I harvested a metric ton of them yesterday morning. It's supposed to frost this weekend, so I thought I'd better get them now. Unfortunately, the reporter here forgot to take a picture of all
the green tomatoes in the dish drainer (we put her on bathroom cleaning detail as punishment for her negligence) and I don't have a picture of that 'metric ton' of tomatoes, but I assure you there were many. My drainer fairly floweth over. So much so that after I cut up 3/4 of them, I filled up a 6-quart slow cooker bowl, and I still had some left over....like enough to crowd the countertop. I mean, holy bananas, right? Anyway, my Mum makes a really good green tomato sauce, much like marinara, that she serves over pasta. I asked her to email me the receipe, and this is what I made in the slow cooker, with a few of my own little tweaks. What you see below is (and I apologize for my rampant inexactitude, but I eyeball most of my ingredients when I'm not baking, so a lot of these measurements are very idiosyncratic, like the pesto receipe above...like a fist full of almonds, Savannah? Can you be a little more vague? You'll see that yes, yes I can be.):
>>Green tomatoes, quartered, and about 2" beaneath the rim of the 6-quart slow cooker bowl.
>>2 red onions
>>several cloves of garlic (to taste)...I start with 4, and any additional cloves obviate the need for concern about a) vampire attacks or b) general invasion of personal space by others (great for public transportation riders who hate crowding!)
>>2 glugs of oil
>>about a tablespoon of paprika (or, my method, two quick and forceful shakes from the bulk container)
>>2 teaspoons pepper
>>2 teaspoons salt

The beginnings of green tomato sauce (with a few red tomatoes in there
because we had them handy)

After it cooked for four hours (the funny lady here forgot that turning on the knob means nothing until the appliance is plugged in and that took an hour for her to realize...you know, I was looking at it going, 'why isn't it getting hot?'), I used my immersion blender and made it into a genuine, stick-to-the-pasta sauce. When I was boxing it up to put in the freezer, I sampled extensively. For all my ingredient-measuring inexactitude, it cooked up beautifully.
Meanwhile, on the pepper front, our dehydrator produced a lovely baggy of Hungarian Hots, Wax Hots, Habaneros, which all will, in time, be contributing their concentrated fire to chocolate chip cookies. Here they are in a rather un-glamorous shot. Like a bunch of mummy finger, they are:

Egyptian Mummy-fingers...*cough*
No, actually, they're dehydrated hot peppers.

Finally, like the program Sunday Morning, I'll leave you with a nature scene. Pleasant Valley in fall:

Moment with nature: the color of autumn in the valley. It gets more vibrant
every day.

Moment with nature: the color of autumn behind the farmhouse.